Monday, 29 June 2015

I am very glad to say that today I now finally have Warp3D Southern Island drivers working under AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition on my Sam460CR!

The solution works because I found a low profile 1-slot Sapphire Radeon 7750 1GB DDR5 PCI-E graphics card cheaply on Ebay!

My other cards that work with the Southern Island Warp3D drivers (intended for my X1000) are only 2-slot cards, and so they don't fit in the Sam460CR as the PCI needed for the SATA card is directly underneath the PCI-E card slot.

Here is a close up of the card:

A view of the backside of the card, showing the model number and other details for those who want to hunt down this card themselves (click to expand any of the photos):

Here it is, now installed in the system. Really. Not. Much. Room in there!

Because it is a low profile card, I needed to remove the backplate for now as I don't have a full length backplate that fits the card (the card was second hand).

Before installing the new card I had already previously installed on AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition the Warp3D Southern Island Drivers (available for purchase on AMIStore App Store), and also the updated Radeon HD 2.7 Drivers (also available for purchase on AMIStore).

I turned on the Sam460CR and it worked immediately - picked up the Radeon 7750 and Workbench worked as normal. But of course, Workbench is not what this upgrade is all about...

Here is a Warp3D demo called "The Trip" running on the Sam460CR:

It's been so long since I had Warp3d (using a much slower 9250 PCI card) - I forgot how great it looks:

After this demo finished, I moved on to run some of HunoPPC AmigaOS4.1 games, which need Warp3D to run, such as Secret Maryo Chronicles:

Some other Huno PPC games I tried included Patience Mahjongg:

I also enjoyed playing Equilibrio again:

Another Warp3D game I have for AmigaOS4.1 is F-1 Spirit:

It is nice to be able to play this game again, although I am still terrible at it:

Hyperion's Quake 2 AmigaOS 4.1 port runs nicely in Warp3D, but make sure to use the 8-bit sound drivers rather than 16 bit to avoid some strange audio issues I encountered:

Hexen II was next up, and I am glad to be able to run some nostalgic 3D games using the new Warp3D drivers:

Moving forward now quite a number of years to VoxelNoid:

I also took a look at Nexuiz, but it is too slow on the Sam460CR to be playable. It is better on the X1000 of course but I can't test that unfortunately...

Last but not least I tried out Aquaria, which runs great again:

I have looked at most of these games on my blog in the past so I won't rehash old ground again here.

I still intend to play around a lot more with Warp3D, but I was so happy to finally have this working on the Sam460CR I just had to quickly show it off! :-)

As I hit the 3 year mark, I do sincerely hope this blog has been useful and helpful in helping other X1000 owners to enjoy their systems more.

I also hope that other Amiga users (Classic and Next Generation) have enjoyed reading this blog for the past 3 years.

I have tried my best to show why Amiga systems are still fun in 2012-2015, now 30 years after the first Amiga 1000 was released in 1985!

It is a shame that I couldn't celebrate the 3 years with my X1000, which inspired me starting this blog originally. It is being looked at over in the UK by AmigaKit and Varisys.

While waiting for my X1000 to be sorted out though I haven't wallowed in unhappiness - in fact, quite the opposite!

I have moved on (as you may know) by buying a new Acube Systems Sam460CR to run AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition and I have covered plenty of new AmigaOS developments since then on this blog. (I also have looked at MorphOS 3.8, 3.9 and Classic Amiga stuff too!)

I am very grateful to have the Sam 460CR system to use:

This year I have been particularly active with blogging about various Classic and Next Generation Amiga topics, podcasts, interviews and getting involved more in local Adelaide based Amiga events and website/facebook promotion to try to engage with the local Adelaide Amiga community here and show them what is happening for Amiga in 2015!

Thanks for following my blog so far, and rest assured there will be plenty more good stuff to come!

Monday, 8 June 2015

Today I want to take a sneak peak at a preview version of MultiViewerNG on AmigaOS 4.1 FE, written by Andy 'Broadblues' Broad for A-Eon Technology Ltd, in development for over 6 months and soon to be released on AMIStore.

I have been offered a sneak peak at this software by A-Eon - thanks for this! I have been testing it on my Sam 460CR. (click on any images in this post to expand)

It is coming to AMIStore very soon - officially called MultiviewerNG for AmigaOS4.1 - I shorten the title to Multiviewer in this blog post as the software is called Multiviewer everywhere else:

There should also be a version for Classic Amigas as well, but this blog entry is focused on the AmigaOS 4.1 version.

Once the Multiviewer software is downloaded and extracted you have the following drawer, which contains the installer to set things up for Multiviewer:

As Multiviewer is a replacement for the AmigaOS Multiview utility, it needs to make some changes to your system to make Multiviewer the default instead - you don't have to make Multiviewer the replacement for Multiview if you don't want to, and you are given the option during the installation:

An assign for Multiviewer: is created in s:user-startup for wherever you choose to install the program.

Once installed, I opened Multiviewer and load an image to start with:

There is a toolbar across the top with the various options available, which are:

You can move the mouse pointer over each icon for a description of what it does.

As with Multiview, Multiviewer uses AmigaOS Datatypes to display files. Unlike Multiview, Multiviewer supports multiple files at the same time, and allows manipulation of images too.

In the above example you can see the image doesn't fit in the display window of Multiviewer, with scroll bars to view the rest of the image.

If I click on the Fit button, it will resize the image proportionally to fit the window size, as below:

I can also rotate the image left or right - very useful for images from cameras and smartphones where the image was taken in portrait mode and needs to be adjusted:.

I can also use the Fill option, which will resize the image to fill all of the screen display and provide a scrollbar for the bits that don't fit:

If I then open another image, it is added to the file list on the left hand side. This enables me to quickly select either one for viewing:

There are buttons at the bottom of the File List section to clear the file list, add files, remove files, and to move files up and down the list.

I can also copy a section of the image by selecting Mark (from the top toolbar) - then drag the bars around the section you want, and then click on Copy:

I can then open a new tab (like a tabbed browser) by right clicking and selecting the Project > New Tab option as below:

I now get a blank tab, into which I can load another image/file:

I can also paste the contents of the image I copied earlier into this tab - note the tab name changes to the Clipboard 383 title now:

I can then save this new cropped image by right clicking on it, and select Project > Save Image As > and then choose your preferred image format - ILBM, JPG, PNG or TIFF:

I chose PNG, and then called it test.png and saved it.

You can also apply different filters to the types of files you want to be able to see with Multiviewer - via right click, Settings > Filter by:

As mentioned you can open text files too, an example below is the included Multiviewer.doc file:

You can click Edit button to edit the document in Notepad - this can be reconfigured via the icon tool types for Multiviewer as desired (eg. if you prefer a different editor for a datatype) - Picture editing lines are shown below as an example:

Note that if you find you have issues opening a particular datatype(s), you may find that uncommenting (NOCACHING) to NOCACHING in the icon tool types (as shown above) may help with it - it worked for me.

You can also search for text within text files when open in Multiviewer. The image manipulation icons in the toolbar change when looking at a text file to a new set of text specific options:

1. Search Text
2. Find next occurrence
3. Find previous occurrence

When clicking on Search Text button, you get the following window pop up to enter the search text, case sensitive and which direction to search in:

Results of the search for 'SDK' in S:user-startup file:

Note that if there is not a datatype in the Dev/Datatypes and
Classes/Datatypes folder for the file you are trying to view, it will
not display in Multiviewer. You can add extra datatypes though - more on this soon.

You can also choose to hide the File List and toolbar icons, if for example you prefer a clean Multiview classic style look or want to maximise the image viewing area - this option is available by right clicking, then selecting Navigation > Show File List (or press F7) or Navigation > Show Toolbar (or press F9):

You can also maximise, minimise or even open Multiviewer on it's own screen - very helpful if you have dual monitors, or if you just want to have it running on it's own screen with one display:

Here is a GIF in Multiviewer - I tested many of the common image formats:

You can click on the Slideshow toolbar button to automatically show all photos in the file list, with a short delay between each one:

You can also playback sounds through Multiviewer - I show examples below like a WAV file and 8SVX sound file:

I can also view/interact with AmigaGuide files through Multiviewer:

As with Multiview, you can download additional AmigaOS4 Datatypes from OS4depot.net and install them to add additional filetype functionality to Multiviewer.

Example datatype I tried is Mpegadt from OS4depot here that you can use to playback MP3 files in Multiview and now Multiviewer:

Once installed, MP3 files can then be played back through Multiviewer - here I have two different mp3's in two tabs:

Multiviewer has a lot to offer, is a big improvement over the classic Multiview and I think it will only get even better over time! It is well worth getting Multiviewer when it comes out!